Second Life Tutorials

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Building Blocks

Clothing in Second Life® is comprised of up to nine different pieces for different parts of your avatar. To create these various types of clothing, Linden Lab provides users with a set of Adobe® Photoshop® templates. Note that there are not individual templates for each type of clothing but a consolidated set. The following is a list of the clothing items and the corresponding templates used to create each item:

Upper Body Template

Upper Body Template

Gloves

Shirt

Undershirt

Both Upper and Lower Body Templates

Jacket

Lower Body Template

Lower Body Template

Pants

Underpants

Shoes

Socks

Skirt Template

Skirt Template

Skirt

Download the Templates

Make certain that you download one of the following sets of templates. The current (7 Jan 2007) individual template downloads are missing some important elements that are referred to in my tutorials.

Template Structure

Template Structure

The clothing template files are structured to assist you in applying your artwork or textures to the appropriate section of the body without any gaps or seems. One thing to keep in mind when creating your clothing is that given the extreme customizability of Second Life avatars, it can be difficult to plan for every possible body type. Because of this, clothing that appears to look good on your own avatar may appear stretched or deformed on other avatars whose geometry is radically different.

Overlay and Background

Front & Back Lines Connect

These layers provide a solid template for the basic edges of where you textures should be placed. Colored edges are provided to help you match which edges attach to each other. The red line on the front will match with the red line on the back when attached to your avatar.

UV Map

UV Map

A UV map is a technical term for a two dimensional (2D) blueprint for a three dimensional (3D) object. Why is it called UV? UV is actually an abbreviation for UVW which is simply the three letters that occur alphabetically before XYZ, which we all know are the axes that describe three dimensional space.

The lines on the UV map describe the connected shapes that combine to make your avatar three dimensional. When you re-shape you avatar, it is those lines, faces, and vertices which stretch and shrink. The UV map will help you accurately connect different parts of your clothing.